The world's stupidest IRC bot

I’m an IRC power user, having been hanging out in 200+ channels on 10+ networks 24/7 for the past 10 years or so. Because IRC is standardized and simple, a common pastime for IRC enthusiasts is the creation of bots. In one of the social channels I hang out in, we’ve spent the past 6 years gradually building the world’s stupidest IRC bot: wormy.

For a start, wormy is highly schizophrenic. Though it presents itself as a single bot, it is in fact a bouncer which combines the connections of 7 independent bots. At one point, this number was higher — as many as 11 — but some bots were consolidated.

Drew DeVault's blog

Posted at 2021-03-29 00:00:00 | Software | read on

2021-03-28

On Wednesday, 2021-03-31 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 2-3 hours from about 19:00 to 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+02:00.

The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.

Update: the maintenance was finished at 2021-03-31 19:10 UTC+02:00.

2021-03-28

svkbd 0.3 released: download

The complete guide for open sourcing video games

Video games are an interesting class of software. Unlike most software, they are a creative endeavour, rather than a practical utility. Where most software calls for new features to address practical needs of their users, video games call for new features to serve the creative vision of their makers. Similarly, matters like refactoring and paying down tech debt are often heavily de-prioritized in favor of shipping something ASAP. Many of the collaborative benefits of open source are less applicable to video games. It is perhaps for these reasons that there are very few commercial open source games.

However, there are some examples of such games, and they have...

We are building a new systems programming language

It’s an open secret: the “secret project” I’ve been talking about is a new systems programming language. It’s been underway since December ‘19, and we hope to release the first version in early 2022. The language is pretty small — we have a mostly complete specification which clocks in at 60 pages. It has manual memory management, no runtime, and it uses a superset of the C ABI, making it easy to link with libraries and C code. It should be suitable almost anywhere C is useful: compilers, system utilities, operating systems, network servers and clients, and so on.

use io;

export fn main() void = {
	const...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2021-03-19 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

Status update, March 2021

After the brief illusion of spring, this morning meets us with a cold apartment indoors and fierce winds outdoors. Today concludes a productive month, mainly for the secret project and for sourcehut, but also marked by progress in some smaller projects as well. I’ll start with those smaller projects.

I have written a feed reader for Gemini, which is (1) free software, and (2) available as a free hosted service. Big thanks to adnano, the author of the go-gemini library, which has been very helpful for many of my Gemini-related exploits, and who has been a great collaborator. I also used it to provide Gemini support for the new pages.sr.ht,...

The corporate surveillance machine is killing people

I have never been angrier about the corporate surveillance complex, which I have rallied against for years, than I am today. Buying and selling user’s private information on the open market is bad enough for the obvious reasons, but today, I learned that the depths of depravity this market will descend to are without limit. Today I am more angry and ashamed at this industry than I have ever been. Corporate surveillance and adtech has turned your phone into an informant against you and brought about the actual murder of the user.

Vice: Military Unit That Conducts Drone Strikes Bought Location Data From Ordinary Apps

Say you’re a...

To make money in FOSS, build a business first

I’ve written about making money in free and open source software before, but it’s a deep topic that merits additional discussion. While previously I focused on what an individual can do in order to build a career in FOSS, but today I want to talk about how you can build a sustainable business in FOSS.

It’s a common mistake to do this the wrong way around: build the software, then the business. Because FOSS requires you to surrender your sole monetization rights, building the software first and worrying about the money later puts you at a huge risk of losing your first-mover advantage. If you’re just making...

Gmail is a huge source of spam

5× as many spam registrations on sourcehut are from gmail than from the second-largest offender.

# SELECT
  SPLIT_PART(email, '@', 2) as domain, count(*) as count
  FROM "user"
  WHERE user_type = 'suspended'
  GROUP BY domain
  ORDER BY count DESC;
          domain           | count
---------------------------+-------
 gmail.com                 |   119
 qq.com              ...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2021-02-25 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

A great alternative is rarely fatter than what it aims to replace

This is not always true, but in my experience, it tends to hold up. We often build or evaluate tools which aim to replace something kludgy^Wvenerable. Common examples include shells, programming languages, system utilities, and so on. Rust, Zig, etc, are taking on C in this manner; so too does zsh, fish, and oil take on bash, which in turn takes on the Bourne shell. There are many examples.

All of these tools are fine in their own respects, but they have all failed to completely supplant the software they’re seeking to improve upon.1 What these projects have in common is that they expand on the ideas of...